I’ve huge admiration for the media in war zones. They risk their life in the pursuit of truth. I don’t care about the reasons they took the job. They do us a great service. Look, the job of life is to turn your negatives into positives. I mean, that’s like saying: “All those performers, they’re really insecure. They need twenty thousand people a night screaming ‘I love you’ to feel normal . . .” [stands up to imaginary critic, dismissing in his tone any intention to be apologetic] “YEAH. YEAH.” [laughs] I mean, no one does anything interesting for just the right reason. It’s the flaw that makes the frame. Ask any great photographer. You wouldn’t write a song if you didn’t have a hole in your heart. This is not one of the great insights, is it? You only have to meet war correspondents. I meet them all the time. And I look at them and I see the same mad eyes that I see in the mirror. [laughs] “They’re my mad eyes, what are you doing with them?” Oh gosh, they love their wives, they love their children, but they are compelled by what’s at stake in these far-off places. They are witnesses, they see how the way the decks are shuffled thousands of miles away can turn other communities into pink dust. That is hard to walk away from. Because our lives do have meaning, our votes do affect lives of people we will never meet. Politics matters. We grew up in a generation where we were told it didn’t, and we were bored: “No matter who you vote for, the government always gets in.” That’s wrong. We have to puncture that. We might find out that the reason the war correspondent is there, is because . . .
. . . he wants the adrenaline rush.
It could be the adrenaline rush. It could be that he killed a kid in a car, and he’s trying to save kids’ lives. You know, people might have a whole array of real reasons and excuses for being there, but that doesn’t matter. They do an amazing job. You can title this chapter: “My life as a disaster groupie.” Yes, I am attracted to the front line and the people that I meet on it.
Met someone special on the front line?
I met Don McCullen, the famous photographer. He took some photographs of U2 in peacetime. [laughs] And you know, people who’ve seen the sort of things that he’s seen normally don’t talk about them, because it’s too much. I don’t talk about what I see when I come back from Africa. I do not sit down at the kitchen table and talk about lives lost in front of me, or talk about those feelings.
Maybe you should. Because this is how people respond. They don’t respond to abstract ideas, but they respond to a certain photograph, to a certain testimony.
Yeah, they do. You know, I’m trying to do it. I pushed on McCullen to do it. And he told me something that I will never repeat, even to myself, because it so disturbed me. I wish I hadn’t asked him. Because some images just overpower the eye. They just storm your brain and take prisoner of it. I have so many of those experiences. Sometimes I just don’t want to share them.
Of course, I do understand that. But then again, let me put forward an example. Ten years after World War II, the French director Alain Resnais made a documentary called Nuit et brouillard—“Night and Fog.” He used archives from the French and German military in order to help people see what the concentration camps were actually like. People did know about them, but they hadn’t realized what they actually looked like. That is the purpose of documentaries if they’re any good, or of a specific testimony. It can be yours, it can be anyone’s. Only after they saw Resnais’s film did a lot of people come to fully realize what the extermination was, and some said: “We didn’t know, we had no idea.” After that, they couldn’t say that anymore. That is the purpose of true stories. I don’t know if I got you right, but I think the thing about not being too precise or too concrete may be a mistake.
No. They come out when they come out. I’m just saying it’s not something that I talk about. And it’s not something I want to talk about. It overpowers you in moments when you are really not expecting to. You find yourself walking down a street with tears rolling down your face, and pictures that you can never be separate from, but you wish you could.
It seems like the experiences that you had while traveling in Africa are the ones that you refrain from talking about, more so than El Salvador and Nicaragua.
It was different. What is going on in Africa defies all concepts that we hold to be true: our concept of neighbor, our concept of civilization, our concept of equality, of love. I mean, you can just forget about it. What Africa says about Europe and America is withering. It says we’ve built our Houses of Parliament and government on sand, because if we really believed the things we say we believe, we would not let 23 million Africans die of AIDS. You can’t have the benefits of globalization without some of the responsibilities. We are now next-door neighbors through television images, through radio, through the Internet, and in fact. [laughs] The thing we forget: in Europe, while we’re pointing a finger at America—we are their actual neighbors, not America.
You cannot deny there are a lot of European NGOs in Africa.
Yes, Irish, French. In fact, Médecins Sans Frontières are one of my favorites. I met this guy in Soweto—Lawrence Ndou. MSF had kept him alive. He is an advertisement for these drugs that are denied all Africans: drugs that cost nothing to produce. After research and development, they cost nothing. It’s a pittance. We’ve heard all kinds of excuses why we haven’t given those drugs out: too complicated. The drug regimen. Africans don’t have wristwatches, they wouldn’t know when to take the drugs. All this kind of propaganda and rubbish. And I meet this fellow—he looks like a pop star. He’s a beautiful-looking man, twenty-seven years old. Six months ago, he was on death’s door. The only reminder that he was HIV-positive and had full-blown AIDS was scratches he had all over him from the itching, and scars. I said to him: “That’s so great.” He says: “Well, I lost my wife. She didn’t get on the drugs on time, she was dead before I got to the drugs. So I have two kids, and I look after them.” And I say: “Well, it’s great that you have survived.” He says: “Well, it’s not great, because I have a new love in my life, and she is now looking after my children like they were her own.” I say: “Well, that’s fantastic.” And he says: “She is now HIV-positive, and she can’t get to these drugs. So what do I do? I give her my drugs, and my children lose their last parent. I share the drugs, and we both die slowly. Or I keep my drugs and let the love of my life die in front of my eyes.” There are lots of issues going on in Africa. It’s complex. There’s corruption, there are problems of their own making, but then there’re problems of our making for them, and then there’re problems we could easily solve for them.
OK. I hope to hear you talking soon about Africa on a very personal level, with stories and people. Because you sometimes have this tendency to dwell on the abstract. [laughs]
Yeah, you’re right.
But I will take you back to actual feelings, people, colors, smells, individual stories, because that will anchor everything that you have to say.
OK. Yeah, obviously, the abstract is a lot easier to deal with than the concrete. But I’ll try. So, look, we’ll make another appointment, doctor, and I will do my very best. So, until then, at the same time: “Tune in five to five, it’s Crackerjack!”
11. ADD ETERNITY TO THAT
Our next telephone call took place a week after the Madrid train bombings that left 191 commuters dead and more than 1,800 wounded on March 11, 2004. Everyone was in shock; it was the biggest terrorist attack to ever occur in Europe. I wrote about it in my weekly column for the French magazineVSD.I wanted to convey how I felt about that act. It was one of those moments I wished I’d been a songwriter.
I wanted to know how Bono reacted to the news—not as a spokesperson or an ambassador for DATA, but as a human being. I mean, how do idealism and goodwill stand in front of that? This is the piece:
Song lyrics may be silly, but they do tell the truth. At the Olympia Theatre in Paris, the Beach Boys’ former songwriter Brian Wilson insisted on dedicating “Love and Mercy” to the people of Spain:
I was lyin’ in my
room and the news came on TV / A lotta people there hurtin’ and it really scares me / Love and mercy, that’s what you need tonight / Love and mercy to you and your friends tonight . . .
Rather dull words, you might say, nothing original about them. But then again, unfortunately, there’s nothing original either nowadays about the Massacre of the Innocents as seen live on TV. Maybe you’ll find his words derisory and useless, but that utterance of compassion made me feel good.
As much as anyone, I was caught between subdued anger and a need to cry when the news came on TV. Is there a way to feel intelligent when you see a gymnasium turned into a makeshift mortuary, strewn with stretchers? Some morning, a handful of people board a commuter train, carrying bags filled with charge, all stuffed with bolts and nails. I am refusing to analyze it. Try putting yourself inside the head of a madman, and pretty soon you’ll find yourself feeling like a madman too. Moreover, that is exactly the aim of those delirious political and religious sects: carrying the world away into a collective madness at the end of which, of course, truth will prevail, a truth that only its followers detain.
So, love and mercy, then . . . In a magazine calledCourier International, I have just read about the story of Zarema, a twenty-three-year-old from Chechnya. Armed with an explosive belt, she renounced, just at the last minute, to smash herself to pieces in a pub in Moscow, and turned herself in to the police. A Russian journalist got the opportunity to interview her in her cell. There she told him her appalling life story. Her mother abandons her while she is a ten-month-old baby. Then her father gets murdered on a building site in Siberia. It doesn’t sound like a great start in life. It isn’t. Raised by her grandparents, she is forced into marrying “according to our old customs,” as she puts it, some local dealer. Pretty soon, the man gets shot down by a competing gang. At that time, she is expecting his baby. For want of money, she is not able to raise her baby daughter by herself. So out of hand the husband’s clan places the baby in another family. Zarema is accordingly parted from her child and sent back to her grandparents’ place. They live at the far end of the country.There, she goes out of her mind with grief. So what does she do? She robs the family jewels, which she proceeds to sell to the market, so as to board a plane and to abduct her daughter. But her aunts recapture her just as she is about to do that. They humiliate her and strike her repeatedly, because she has become the disgrace of the family.
So Zarema sees only one solution. To become at last a “decent person”—I’m quoting her words here—she thinks she has to sacrifice herself for Allah and Jihad, so her shame gets washed away and her debt paid off, since the rebels give away a thousand dollars to a martyr’s family. At the rebels’ hideout, she encounters other suicide applicants. One of them, a nineteen-year-old girl, blows herself up during an open-air rock concert in Moscow: fourteen dead. Zarema sees the bodies on television. Something clicks in her head. Above all, she feels compassion for the young girl who died in the operation, the one whom she saw every day—her companion.“She is the one that I pitied the most,”she says. So her eyes open and she gives up the madness. You can say a kind of miracle happened.
Love and mercy: those words do not only make sense for the survivors. In order to fight effectively against the terrorist insanity, perhaps they’re more useful weapons than the infiltration of cells, the shelling of villages and the so-called war on terror. Because the nature of that terror is moral and religious as much as it is political, the answer sometimes has to be of the same nature. In one case, love and mercy simply worked.
[in a sort of growl] Bono-jour!
I’m sorry, it’s not “Bono-jour.” It’s “bonjour”!
“Bono-jour!”
Good morning! I’m very happy to hear your voice.
[with a scowl] And what’s good about it?
It’s been a long time.
I’m a little under the weather today, so I don’t know if I’ll be of any use to you. But here goes. How are you doing yourself?
I’m fine, but in a bit of a shock about the Madrid bombings. I wanted to read out to you the piece I wrote yesterday. [so I carry out my threat] Simple question here: where were you “when the news came on TV”?
[sighing] The news seems to be now on TV every hour of every day. I heard about it on the radio, but it was only when I came in to the studio at lunchtime that I saw the pictures. Heartbreaking.
Do you know that song, “Love and Mercy”?
“Love and Mercy” is one of the great songs ever written. The thing about song lyrics is: with the cadence and the way the melody falls, they can be more articulate than any purely literate response. This is something that any non-English speaker knows. It’s a funny thing, but when U2 songs are written, I don’t write them in English. I write them in what the band call “Bongelese.” [laughs] I just sing melodies and the words form in my mouth, later to be deciphered. I remember Brian Eno saying: “Why put them into English, Bono? They’re so eloquent as they are.” And he had a point. So pop lyrics, in a way, are just a rough direction that you sketch for where the listener must think toward. That’s it, the rest is left up to you. Which is why pop music becomes the folk music of the next era. Feelings travel better than thoughts. I can’t think of a greater song to be sung than Brian Wilson singing “Love and Mercy.” Because, in a way, they’re the two feelings that those terrorists sought to destroy.
What song would have you sung had you been onstage on that day?
“When Will I See You Again?”—the Three Degrees.
How does it go?
[sings] When will I see you again? De-de-de-de-de . . . / When will we share precious moments? It’s a song about loss. That song can bring you to tears. It’s a very strange course of events. We played in Nuremberg on the PopMart Tour in August 1997. There’s a venue there, which is where Hitler was to be buried with his generals. They had marked out an area. There’s a stadium, the Zeppelinfeld, which is associated with the Third Reich. It is an Albert Speer building. There was some controversy about us playing there. I remember thinking: No, we should never be afraid of a building. And if people are so scared of it, paint it pink or something like that. Howie B, my great friend, was deejaying. He has produced U2 and was on tour with us. Jewish. He was very unnerved by playing there. He said to me: “I’m not sure if I want to do this.” I said: “Well, you don’t have to if you don’t want.” But he went on and started his set by playing the Three Degrees’ “When Will I See You Again?” It was just the most remarkable thing to see this joyous jazzman with tears down his face, decades later, mourning people of his own ethnic group that he’d never met, but feeling it. I really felt this song just chase the devil away. [sighs] Because you should never think about these things on a grand scale: these are families, and sisters and brothers and uncles.
That’s how I felt yesterday.
When we played the United States on our last tour, after 9/11, we were among the first bands to go into New York and play a proper show.
I had no idea about that.
Yes. We felt it important to make the same point. These people were not statistics. We used these giant screens to project the names of everyone who’d lost their life. If I turned around and I looked at the screen, I would see “Elvin Romero,” “Efrain Romero,” “Monica Hoffman,” “Stephen Hoffman”—fathers and sons, whatever it was. Everybody in Madison Square Garden could see somebody they knew or somebody who knew somebody, and the whole place wept. And it wasn’t just their own grief—they wept for other people’s grief. When everyone’s dancing and jumping up and down, there’s that deep well of pathos because everybody is connected.
It’s weird that you should mention simultaneously 9/11 and that U2 concert at Madison Square Garden. It seems to imply that the inhabitants of a big city feel connected to each other through only two kinds of events: when a horrible catastrophe happens or when they gather for a rock concert. It’s like the most joyful or the most horrible event both produce a strangely similar effect:
to make people feel like they’re all one. On that night, it was apparently an odd combination of both.
[light chuckle] Yeah, a great rock show can be a transcendent event. A crap one on the other hand can feel like a funeral—your own! But it’s an extraordinary thing to get seventy thousand people or seven thousand people to agree on anything. I mean, we’ve all been to really doglike events. [laughs] They just bite your arse and you feel like you’ve got the worst ticket in the world, and that sound is blowing everywhere but by you, and somebody’s pissing up against the fence. Or indoors, it’s the same. I mean, in a club, you can feel as far from the singer as in a stadium, depending on the mentality of the singer. It’s not about physical proximity. But when it comes right, it is the most remarkable thing.
What’s your definition of community?
This is the question that hangs in the sky over our heads at the moment. Through media, we have some strange faces in our backyard whom we weren’t calling family until very recently, and we still don’t really want to. But if you’re going to enjoy having your sneakers and your jeans made by developing communities, you are already involved with those people. You cannot therefore just ignore some of the problems they’re negotiating. They’re living on your street. There was this old definition of generosity, which is at the very least the rich man looks after the poor man on his street. Guess what? [laughs] Now, that street goes round the globe.
So you’re saying invisibility doesn’t work for either end of the street.
That’s why New York never had to deal with race riots in the nineties like L.A. did. The rich and the poor see each other every day, pass each other on the same street, travel the subway. Eye contact is unavoidable. In L.A., you have a mosaic of suburbs very separate from each other, economically, culturally. If they pass each other on the street, it’s on an eight-lane freeway. It’s an environment for the mistrust and the hatred that can come out of that after an incident like Rodney King.
Bono Page 20
